Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Wednesday, January 14, 2015

French anti-Semitism and Muslim Violence (PART 1)

The Times of London headline on the 9th of January 2015 read:
"France
is paying price for pushing six million Muslims to the margins."

Since the
attack on Charlie Hebdo offices took place (on the 7th of January
2015), the murder of the policewoman and the subsequent murder of four Jewish
shoppers at a kosher supermarket on the 9th of January there have
been thousands of lines of print wasted on making excuses for the kind of people
that carried out the attacks.

We can all
make excuses for our behavior – the pedophile was abused as a child, the wife
beater was beaten by his parents, the right wing racist is a product of his
family environment.But the Muslim
racist is the product of poverty or discrimination in society. His or her
embitterment is the fault of society itself.Everyone is forgiven their sins of commission except of course that this
is not the whole picture.

Why
not?We live in a world of choice, we
all have the freedom to watch what we like, read what we desire, speak our
ownthoughts and dress as we wish but
magically, as soon as we cross the boundaries for what society deems“acceptable behavior” we are condemned.
Society judges us by the standards that society sets.We abide by the rules and society protects us.
It is called the “social contract”. It has inspired political reform since before
the French Revolution and it can be argued that it has served imperfectly, as
the cornerstone of Western Society since that time.

But
standards are not necessarily applied uniformly and it is with this issue that
injustice occurs. We too often excuse the murderer and damn the innocent. It is
how we perceive injustice that informs the way we see society and the press is
inevitably at the forefront of interpreting both that perception and the
reaction.It is imperfect, prejudiced;
the arbiter of morality, judge, and jury and by its complicity in forming
public opinion, society’s executioner.

Imagine
society as a room with people chained to the walls. For thousands of years
those chains defined the distance we could wander. At the same time our
proximity to one another was finite so that the alliances we made protected
us.When the chains were removed we were
free to wander away from the group or we could choose to stay. Our freedom of
action expanded exponentially, as did our choices. By the same process, action
and reaction became both random (unpredictable) and disconnected.The freedoms we have experienced over little
more than the last century created challenges we are barely capable of
predicting let alone adequately and equitably responding to them. Our legislative
activism has been inconsistent and philosophically parlous in responding to the
new world we inhabit.

We should
not condemn an entire religion for the actions of a minority even though Jews
appear to be excepted from this rule.Muslims have slaughtered innocents but we cannot blame all Muslims. Nor
should we refrain from debating the many sources of tension that enabled
criminals to assume a right to commit murder with joy in their hearts. It says something terrible about their
education system and ours that we are hesitant if not terrified to openly
discuss these things.

The problem
is in those standards that society set.If we fail to apply them equitably then our standards are a sham.
Polygamy and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) are both illegal in Western
society. Yet we pay social security to Muslim men who control multiple
wives.Thousands of girls are physically
tortured and psychologically sentenced to a life behind bars, every year, in London, England
when their parents permit the abomination of FGM to take place without
consequence.Mosques that incite their
congregants to hate the infidel and to commit violence against the non-believer
are permitted to remain open because their free speech and freedom of belief
supersedes, potentially, our right to life.That social contract I referred to earlier is only selectively
applied.That selective application of
human rights is where the fracture in society has occurred.

The
question we should be asking is how we can repair it and whether that fault
line is irreparably damaged?

In a New
York Times oped Dennis Ross referred to the free pass given to Muslims in
Western Society as “reflexive absolution.”Not just in the West.I recently
read that over the last decade 100,000 Christians have been murdered every year
in the Muslim world and in countries where Islam has a significant minority
presence.I cannot verify that figure of
a million dead but the number of killed is much higher for Muslim on Muslim
violence.

We appear
to be powerless to prevent this ongoing escalation of Islamic bloodletting.

The outrage
we all felt when over 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Muslim fundamentalists
in Nigeria
very quickly dissipated.We should have
boycotted Nigeria
until every girl had been accounted for and returned to their families. We did
NOTHING.

We share
few values with those people who cannot either renounce a holy book or if not
renounce it, then to accept a modern western concept of equality. The Muslim
world has no sense of accountability but one heck of an over-inflated sense of
grievance that treats any concessions as illegitimate.There is a myth and it is called Islamic
tolerance.Islam’s sense of superior
purpose can only be met head on.

Reflexive
absolution is a great catch phrase that describes the western worlds’ selective
immorality and its ethical bankruptcy towards Islamic terrorism. A paradigm
shift in our attitude towards our religious competitors is needed if society is
ever to be mended.